Newfound by Jim Wayne Miller (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Jim Wayne Miller. Newfound. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1997 224 pages. $12.50. Paperback. On the highway I frequently follow between Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, a large green sign west ofAsheville announces the exit to Newfound, arural communityoffields, pastures, and homes nestled among gentle hills. For me the sign keeps fresh the memoryofmy friend, JimWayne Miller, the Western Kentucky University professor, author, and poet whose boyhood home was in that country. More important, his novel, Newfound, published in a handsome new paperback edition by Frankfort's Gnomon Press, will continue to remind me and many other readers ofthe youthful curiosity that is indiscriminate as a sponge, soaking up everydetail ofthe experience we define as "growing up." And while the coming-of-age time in Southern Appalachia may be regional in flavor, Jim Wayne Miller has shown us that it is universal in its discovery of bitter defeats and small triumphs, unexpected affection and casual cruelty, the family bonds that are strongestwhen they are letting go. It was in the first Appalachian Workshop I taught at Berea College many summers ago that I looked around the room and encountered those brown eyes, wide and attentive as ifready to absorb every detail ofall that would be thought and said at that moment in that place. Here was the total listener, the delight and challenge ofany speaker. Ofcourse, as often happens when there is neither arrogance nor diffidence on either side, we learned that we were both students, although of different ages, discovering and rediscovering the place we claimed and that claimed us. Our friendship grew as I invited Jim Wayne to come to the University ofTennessee at Knoxville in a program for Appalachian teachers sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. He would return and participate in many educational efforts in the area until his final illness leading to his death. Throughout his life, his literary output flourished. Poetry provided a voice for distilling experience through the richest use ofimagery and metaphor . Essays explored the myths and realities ofSouthern Appalachia. As a native and a scholar he balanced the factual core and the exaggerated false65 ness ofstereotypes undermining the truth ofthe region. And as a university professor he filled a career in higher education. Finally, in his writing he turned to the novel, looking back from his home in Kentucky to his first home in North Carolina to tell the story of Robert Lee Wells, his family and an ever widening community offriends. Folk beliefs and characters from earlier poems echoed pleasantly in these pages. Ever-old, ever-fresh, this is the coming-of-age story that has engaged great tellers and ready readers through the centuries. In Newfound, Jim Wayne explores the mystery, to their children, of parents' differences, but he never exploits the pain created by their divorce . With sentiment that never spills over into sentimentality, he evokes a boy's subtle and complex relationships with others, and his response to the seasons, the natural world. Perhaps the real pleasure of Newfound is Jim Wayne's sense of irony, his sustaining humor that invites readers to laugh with, but never at, his people, his world. Itwas appropriate that ourlast briefvisit tookplace last Julyin Hindman at the ninetieth birthday celebration ofhis friend and mentor, James Still. To say that Still's classic, River ofEarth, and Miller's Newfound have much in common is not so much to compare their achievement as to appreciate the quiet, profound sense ofsimple humanity that they shared. And that they continue to share with us. —Wilma Dykeman Miller, Jim Wayne. The BrierPoems. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1997. 159 pages. Paperback. $14.50 This compilation ofthe late JimWayne Miller's The MountainsHave Come Closer (1980) and Brier, HisBook (1988) includes also some recent work. Typically, these poems describe an Appalachian scenery, a scenery both of the eye and ofthe heart. For the most part, the sentiment springing from this landscape seems deeply felt, and poems here can turn eyesores into things ofbeauty (ifnot joys forever). Presumably, the thread that binds this collection is the persona of Brier. "Brier" is a pejorative term sometimes given to Appalachians, but Miller's Brier assumes...